What about you? Be honest if not with me, with yourself.. If they were going to pay for your vote would you take it?
Well, like everything else, it depends on the price, which we can sort of spitball out. A top-20 witness at the moment makes about 275 SP/day, knock off 25 of that for server costs just as a guess, makes 250 that could be used to pay for votes in an optimally-efficient selling system.
Meanwhile a top-20 position takes about 52000 MVests, so that's about 0.0048 SP/day/MVest, or 0.144 Steem/month.
I control approximately 15 MVests worth of votes, so I can expect to earn about 2.16 SP/month/vote from selling my vote.
If I can somehow sell all 30 of them at that price despite the fact that there are only 20 top witness spots, that makes 64.9 SP/month, which is beginning to be not too bad.
I don't think we'd end up with a system that efficient, though. Still, 40/month would be a 0.5% monthly return, which isn't bad.
Awesome explanation. However, would you take it? :)
I don't know. I really don't have a sense of how much I value my witness vote even in the current environment, and it would obviously change a lot if everyone were selling votes.
I think in the most likely scenario I'd sell some of them and give some of them away. But like you I don't use all of mine now, so the question between getting something concrete for them or just the satisfaction of not voting for some people would probably tilt toward the money.